In praise of… Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel is three people in one. He is one of Harvard's box-office lecturers, with up to 1,000 students on his course every year, and he is allegedly the (purely physical) inspiration for Montgomery Burns, the evil nuclear-plant owner in The Simpsons (most of the precocious writing team seem to have been Ivy Leaguers). But it is in his third guise that you can hear him on two of our podcasts today, the Guardian Daily and The Business – as one of the world's most interesting political philosophers. Politicians and commentators tend to ask two questions of policy: will it make voters better off, and will it affect their liberty? Sandel rightly points out the shallowness of that debate and adds a third criterion: how will it affect the common good? In the wrong hands, a question like this can turn into something mushy and indeterminate in taste – moral-philosophical Cow & Gate. Not so with Sandel, who – in the last Reith lectures and his new book Justice, makes his case not with the usual philosopher's hypotheticals but by news stories torn out of the papers. Wheelchair-using cheerleaders, tournament golfers who wish to ban golf carts, and rip-off retailers operating after Hurricane Katrina – these vignettes stud Sandel's argument. This is work reminiscent of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, and which also stresses its indebtedness to Aristotle. At a time when debates such as bankers' bonuses are split between the shrilly populist and the purely technical, Sandel beats a more attractive theoretical path.